Soldwedel

My approach to the web is to use only what is required to accomplish what is desired. Lean.

I believe in stripped-down, low-fat coding; it’s easier to manage and it’s less resource-intensive. You can serve exactly what you wish to purvey and use less bandwidth.

Services

Print and Web Graphic Design

I use Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, etc.) to create logos, designs and advertisements for businesses and individuals.

My work includes designing various logos for a New York City club hockey team (including designing their entire jersey) and a local soccer team, ads for the small business Kick-it (a soccer kick-training device), and album & promotional art for my band, Heroes Die.

Web Development

If you need a blog installed, an e-commerce site maintained, or you require a personal website either created or modified, I provide superlative quality results at competitive rates.

I have additional experience in back-end programming, using PHP both by itself and in the context of blogs, frameworks and templating systems (WordPress, Symfony, Smarty), as well as Perl, and Java-JSP.

Copywriting and Editing

I am a graduate of the Michigan State University School of Journalism, one of the best J-Schools in the United States.

While at the New York Post, I wrote countless headlines, rewrote miles of wire copy, and edited staff stories for publication to nypost.com. When David Carradine died, I had the front page print headline, covering the event. In the tabloid industry, a front page headline is called "The Wood." I was the first (and, I believe, still the only) online staffer to have a print edition front page headline.

My English-language facility is non-pareil. I am a crackerjack editor. I am available for copy editing and developmental editing.

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”

—R. Buckminster Fuller

Portfolio

A brief sampling of my projects

Wenner Media

Wenner Media is the publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal. I served as Senior Front-end Web Developer on an ambitious team of technologists. We built the technological future of the company from scratch. The all-new CMS and codebase for Us Weekly launched in November, 2015.

Hearst Magazines

At Hearst, I worked on ELLE, Road&Track, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Day, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and scads of other well-known, nationally and internationally recognized magazine titles.

Hachette-Filipacchi Media

At HFM Inc., U.S. I focused on web design and front-end development work, signaling a departure from my time in the editor’s chair.

New York Post

It was my dream to work here. I was so excited to be a part of a New York City newspaper. It is a bastion of grit in a place becoming ever more sanitized, and the city needs such counterbalance. I served as Deputy Editor of nypost.com from 2007-2009. In addition to my editorial duties, I was both a front- and back-end developer (PHP, Perl, Java-JSP) from 2005-2010.

Heroes Die

My band. I play the drums, write the songs, and arrange most of the music. I sing backing vocals, too. I made our website.

Tijuana Ricks

Game Boys

My very first paid freelance gig: a promo site for the book Game Boys by author Michael Kane. In the book, he investigates the culture – and lucrative business – of competitive video gaming.

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

—Carl Sagan

Novel

My dystopian sci-fi epic, Disintegration

“A group of soldiers are thrown together on a mission to raid the enemy stronghold and make off with a precious resource. A’arilon Ray suspects it’s a suicide mission but it is just the beginning of a much greater adventure.”

Inkshares is a crowdfunding site. Your support of my project is critical to its success. Please pre-order a copy, today.

As the hook above alludes, there is much more to the story. It takes place on a mirror Earth in a future easily extrapolated from the turmoil that currently grips our planet. Things like climate change, religious fundamentalism and consolidation of world's wealth among a small oligarchy are just a few of the symptoms that lead to global catastophe and the resulting dystopia in which my novel unfolds.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

—Frederick Douglass

Proposals

The web is full of sites with unrealized potential. It is my desire to streamline and beautify as many sites as is possible.

I’ve proposed barter as a method of payment, in some cases, and have offered services pro bono for personal sites or ones belonging to establishments whose wares or ideas I support.

Time Out New York

I interviewed for the Head Designer position at Time Out, back in 2009. I mocked up how I’d envisioned their website. Seven years later, my design still pops more than their current website, which lacks both character and visual appeal.

Adirondack Guitar

I offered to redo Dennis Monahan’s website in an exchange for a guitar of my choice. He declined because he did not want to sacrifice inventory unless it were for income. However, I believe his business would certainly benefit from a site update. I purchased a beautiful, limited edition, left-handed Roy Clarke Heritage H-535 from Adirondack. It’s the prize of my guitar collection.

Vox Pop Cafe

Vox Pop, the now-defunct Ditmas Park cafe, was a great place to congregate and share ideas and conversation with alternative thinkers. Named for “Vox Populi” (voice of the people), the closing of this establishment is just one of the myriad casualties of what once made New York City a vibrant, cool place to be.

Forgotten NY

I offered my services to Kevin Walsh, who used to take painstaking care into individually crafting pages for his site, but he migrated to WordPress and has been reluctant to tap the potential of a custom theme. Kevin did, however, accept my design for a new site logo: the city and the Statue of Liberty in silhouette, saturated in red.

“I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.”

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

About Me

I am a multi-linqual, multi-instrumentalist, multi-media auto-didact. I taught myself how to speak German, Czech and French, and have cultivated my own further development in Spanish and Arabic, and I endeavor always to improve in my native tongue: English. I play the drums, the guitar (also bass) and the piano. I sing. I draw. I write. I code. I play ice hockey. I don’t, however, dance ... but I’m always open to learning a new skill.